Accessing web pages is becoming more difficult as applications using web pages have become larger and more complex. These applications include conventional websites, software applications with web pages, and other applications with web based user interfaces. The website presence of a typical corporation may include a public website with non-confidential corporate information, a secure internal website access with confidential and/or departmental information, an electronic commerce website for ordering, purchasing, and paying for goods or services offered by the company, and many other complex applications. In addition to their inherent complexity, these applications and interfaces are often personalized to a particular user with specific permissions and preferences. Unfortunately, limited processor power, network bandwidth, and storage latencies can make deploying large and complex applications tailored to individual users unwieldy and difficult to manage.
Internationalization and localization considerations present unique challenges as the content and presentation of these websites and applications must be provided in several different languages and locales (i.e., local currencies, time-zones, holidays, and other regional customs). This not only requires modification of the content portion of the application but also the actual text displayed on buttons and other control portions of the application. In certain cases, logic within the website or application may also be modified to accommodate the specific language and locale requirements.
One conventional solution keeps several complete copies of an application for each of the different languages or locales. This requires a great deal of storage and poses difficulties where maintaining updates and changes to the application and interface. Another solution reduces the storage and maintenance issues by separating the localized text and images from the remainder of the application or website. This may reduce maintenance and storage requirements but instead impacts run-time performance of complex web-based applications when accessing and presenting information in the various language and locales.